


it means more to me (than you will ever know)

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: the sword of the jedi [2]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV), Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Historians, Loss of Parent(s), M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mandalorian Culture (Star Wars), Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, The Force, The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28674018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Liam Ironarm's life goes off the rails the day he finds a tiny green child at the other end of a routine bounty hunting job.
Relationships: Buriram Tourakom & Thayet jian Wilima, Liam Ironarm & Baby Yoda, Liam Ironarm & Buriram Tourakom, Liam Ironarm & Eda Bell, Liam Ironarm/Cobb Vanth, Liam Ironarm/Hakuin Seastone, Liam Ironarm/Omera
Series: the sword of the jedi [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2101545
Comments: 12
Kudos: 39





	it means more to me (than you will ever know)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keladrys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keladrys/gifts).



> For triumphdivision, in 12 fandoms of Christmas.

There are few Mandalorians left living, and fewer still with the right to call themselves Shang. Liam Ironarm, Shang Dragon, doesn’t believe himself to be the last of his kind; but it’s a big galaxy, and realistically, there’s little chance that he’ll ever encounter another Shang again. 

Liam is a realistic man. He’s resigned to being a stranger to Nevarro and a stranger to the galaxy; to find himself on only the most formal terms with all members of his covert is unpleasant, but he was a foundling. He has never had any family save the Shang.

He has also never had too much pride to earn his living by bounty hunting, so that’s what he does. Karga’s very important commission is suspicious, and the little green baby is a surprise, but Liam’s a professional. He does his job.

And yet -

The baby is a lost child. The baby is a foundling, like the few small children the covert protects, hidden well away from the city in case the Mandalorians’ hideout is found. A portion of Liam’s earnings always goes to them, though he’s never seen them. The baby is a foundling, like them. Like him. 

He can’t defend himself. He’s a baby. And neither Karga nor the Client will admit to their intentions for him - whatever they are. Liam doesn’t trust them. And when he sees Pershing at work, he knows his instincts were right. He slams the doctor across the room, and steals the child back.

For a few seconds, lying half-concealed on that cart, Liam thinks it’ll be the last thing he ever does, and he can’t quite regret it. 

“Dragon!” Karga yells, his voice echoing through the streets of Nevarro. The buildings are alive with Liam’s fellow bounty-hunters, their fobs blinking red in the darkness. Any civilians left in Nevarro must be lying face down on the floor in the cellar and making their peace with their gods - or the Force, if they believe in that kind of thing. “Dragon! Come out from hiding! You know you can’t last long.”

No. True. But Liam will kill as many of them as he can for lending themselves to a child’s torture first. He racks his rifle’s slide again.

And then, from the shadows of the catacombs, the covert rises in his defence. _Go_ , they say. _Take the child and go._

Liam hopes the other foundlings are safe. He takes this one in his arms, and runs for the _Razor Crest_.

  
  


Sorgan isn’t the first backwater skugghole he finds, but it’s the most promising-looking. Liam likes the green of this place, the look of a community, but his first instinct is to think they’ve already been found out, not an hour after setting down. The weatherbeaten, wary-eyed woman sat opposite from them has a bit of a Guild look to her; old soldier, Liam diagnoses, fallen on harder times, with few scruples and not much money. He knows she picked him out - if not by the armour then by the baby, who will _not_ stay on the ship no matter what Liam says - more or less the moment he walked in. And when she vanishes he immediately thinks the worst.

Buri Tourakom fights him to a standstill, and the kid watches her with curiosity and interest. So Liam succumbs to the instincts that have brought him thus far and buys her a bowl of soup. She’s not Guild, at least.

She tells him to call her Buri; he goes, as he always does, by Dragon, and he thinks Buri might be old enough to remember the significance of armour and name combined, but she doesn’t say anything, not here. She has some Mandalorian ancestry herself, though she was raised on Alderaan, and doesn’t keep the Creed. She lived on Naxen, for a while, she says, and there Liam feels real sympathy for her; pity would suit her little. Pity suits no-one off vanished Naxen, whether it’s righteous Princess Kalasin dressed in mourning white, or the few drifters he’s encountered in his work. Buri, less a drifter than an old soldier who walked away from the New Republic when there was no work left for her to do, has a look in those gleaming black eyes that suggests if he tries to offer her pity she can always just beat him up again.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he offers.

“Thanks,” she says, and is silent for a while.

“Credit for them,” he says.

“I miss my sister,” Buri tells him. She finishes her bowl of soup and stands. “Anyway, best of luck to you and the kid. Find a new hideout. This one’s taken.”

And Liam has every intention of going along with that. But then there’s a set of desperate villagers, and Liam thinks: _let’s call it early retirement_. Maybe there’s a way to make this planet large enough for the both of them, after all.

He finds Buri and offers her a cut of the job. She squints up at him, and she hesitates, but she accepts. It’s a good deal, after all. Food and lodging, and a little simple security guard work. Peace and quiet, which Liam feels sorely in need of. There are even kids who take the baby to their grubby childish hearts, and help him hunt the frogs he keeps trying to swallow whole. At first Liam’s disinclined to let the baby out of his sight - he’s already fought and killed for this kid, and he knows the Empire won’t be off their trail yet - but the pretty widow who seems to be in charge of the villagers' communal brain cell discourages him. And she’s right. The kids are fine. The baby’s happy. This is a peaceful place for any child to grow up, and the security problems look like peanuts next to the places Liam was raised. He chose well. Even Buri thinks so, from the pleased noise she makes when the villagers offer them lunch.

It’s only when Liam finds AT-ST footprints in the mud of the forest that he starts to think this deal might have a catch.

The villagers are resistant to moving. Buri’s resistant to staying. She says it can’t be done.

Liam catches the pretty widow’s eye, and he wonders. Desperate people will do a great deal to save their homes.

“It could be done,” he says out loud. 

“Are you _insane_?” Buri hisses.

The answer, Liam thinks, as he oversees a test of marksmanship - the pretty widow is the only one who can shoot, but she’s suspiciously capable with everything Liam hands her; Liam teases her about it, but she won’t say where she got her skills - is very clearly _yes_. It’s yes when Buri yells a work party into digging a trap for their unwanted visitors, and it’s yes when the trap is complete. It’s yes when he and Buri decide the villagers are as ready as they’ll ever be. It’s yes when he and Buri bait the raiders into chasing them. Liam Ironarm, Shang Dragon, seems to have left his reason behind when he picked up that little green baby.

But since Buri is the fool who takes his rifle and jumps into a krill pond to draw the AT-ST into their trap, Liam thinks she has no room to talk.

“You think _I’m_ insane,” Liam says, lending her a hand out of the pond. 

“I know you are, kid,” Buri says. 

“Cut it out. We must be the same age.”

“Doubt it,” Buri says. “Kid.” She claps him on the shoulder, hard. “Let me track the widow down, if she’s still alive. We have a lot of salvage work to do.”

It’s a peaceful few weeks, once the bodies are dealt with and the AT-ST stripped down and removed from the pond, piece by piece. The children lose their unease; the village rebuilds. Liam and Buri get lazy in the sunshine, and Liam starts to think seriously about leaving the baby behind. 

“He’d be happy here,” he says to the widow, Omera. She’s cleverer than she lets on and her smiles are free and easy, but she has no illusions. They’ve shared a few quiet moments in the shadows, but she won’t let him into her life unless he chooses to stay. And he won’t.

She’s a good woman. Liam trusts her with the baby. 

“I’d be happy to care for him.” Omera turns away to watch the children play. The others have tired of finding frogs for the baby, but it’s still her daughter’s favourite game. 

“You’ll break his heart if you leave, though,” Buri says. She has her feet up on the veranda rail and is rocking back and forth on two legs of her chair.

“He’ll get over it,” Liam says. “We all do.” He glances down at his armour. “All I’m doing is making him a target.”

Neither woman replies. 

In the end the only convincing counter-argument comes from a dead bounty hunter with the child’s skull in his sights. Buri is still standing over him when Liam runs into the woods: the barrel of her blaster is smoking and her eyes are cold and hard.

The fob lies just beyond the hunter’s outstretched hand, still beeping red.

“Who’s it on?” Buri says. 

“The baby.” Liam grinds it beneath his heel, until he feels plastic and metal give way beneath his boot.

“I doubt you want my advice,” Buri says. “But here it is anyway. Take the kid and go. Where there’s one, there’ll be more.”

“You think so?”

Buri says nothing for a while. Then she turns the corpse over with her boot, and eyes it with disfavour. Another one for the village’s healthy stock of illicit weaponry and credits.

“I couldn’t protect any of my sister’s kids,” she says. “Not even the one that survived. Take it from me, Dragon. It’s not a burden you want to live with.”

After Sorgan, everything is progressively dumber and more meaningless. There’s a stupid kid on Tatooine who Liam kills when he threatens the baby, and a crack shot sniper who dies on the sand. Liam’s always liked Tatooine, where they treated him like a local once they’d got past the sheer balls-to-the-wall hubris of calling himself the Dragon (so sue him; there were no krayt dragons where Liam grew up), but Toro Calican puts him off the place. And that mess is nothing compared to the run-in with a bunch of Weequay pirates, or the week they spend in dock because some fucking asshole scored the hyperdrive when they were trying to land, or the amount of time Liam spends shooting people. Only a very few of them seem to know about the child, which is comforting. The rest mostly just want the armour. Liam considers painting it, but there are no colours he’d choose which wouldn’t be a flaming neon sign to the Imperials. _Get your free Shang here. He’s low on credits and has a kid to feed._

All of this, of course, fucking pales in comparison to the job he takes busting an old associate out of prison. Or an old associate’s associate; he doesn’t actually think he’s ever met the brother before. Xi’an, unfortunately, he knows all too well. The so-called sharpshooter, the Devaronian, the droid; he’d never worked with them before but he knows the type better than he’d like.

It’s funny. He used to be fine with these kinds of people being on his ship, and now he feels jumpier than a womp rat in hunting season. The baby seems to be everywhere, and it’s minutes before he’s revealed himself to - of all people - fucking _Mayfeld_. Liam passes him off as a pet, suppressing a pang of guilt. He figures the kid will have to live with it. Not a bad return for giving Liam yet another heart attack. Doesn’t he know how to stay quiet in his bunk?

Liam is all out of patience and he’s on his last nerve. Which is why he’s vindictive enough to stick his so-called employer with the New Republic beacon. By the time the New Republic have sent the boys in orange in to blow the place beyond all sentient help, Liam’s long gone.

The money pays for a nicer meal than usual. He figures they’ve earned it, and he’s not actually sure the kid’s tried a burger before. He takes to it, of course; Liam is rapidly learning that he likes anything that’s meaty, especially if it wriggles.

And then the call from Greef Karga comes. A peace offering, of sorts. Liam thinks it over from beginning to end; he knows a trap when he sees one, but the chance of cutting the poison out at the root is too tempting. The baby deserves a chance to live a settled life, not this vagabond existence. He deserves someone who can care for him properly. His own people.

Liam goes, but he doesn’t go alone. A decision which saves all their lives, except for Kuiil’s. They bury him with honour.

“So what will you do now?” Buri asks, when the dust has settled and the stormtroopers are dead. Moff Ozorne’s TIE fighter went down and crashed in the basalt flatlands, hopefully taking his knowledge of Liam Ironarm, Shang Dragon, and Buriram Tourakom, sometime bodyguard to Thayet Conté and Rebel commander, with him. 

“Find the baby’s kin,” Liam says. “I’ll look for other Mandalorians first; they’ll help me find his own people.”

“You mean the Jedi?” Buri says doubtfully. “I’ve never heard of a species that looks like that.”

“He’s something,” Liam says. His skin prickles uncomfortably at the thought; all he knows of Jedi are the old stories of sorcerers that can steal your thoughts just by looking at you. He was always scared of those. But the child is, as he has always been, nothing more than a child. “I thought Jedi didn’t exist any more. Fairytales.”

“Oh, they’re real all right,” Buri says, frowning slightly. “They move a lot, though, and things change very fast.”

“The child of your sister’s that survived,” Liam says, joining some dots. “That you couldn’t protect.”

“No,” Buri says, with a sharp, startled glance out of the corner of her eye. “Not her. Still.” She shakes her head. “I’ll ask around, Dragon. But I never knew any of the Jedi well, and they keep themselves to themselves. Like Mandalorians.”

The covert below their feet is ruined, the foundlings gone without trace. Liam is too old to shift his weight from foot to foot, but Buri catches the hesitancy, the bitter regret that lies behind it.

“Take care, Dragon,” she says, and flicks one of the baby’s ears with a gentle finger. It coos at her. “Take care of this one, too.”

The road to a new covert of Mandalorians is long and winding. It takes in Tatooine, and a marshal who has no right to the armour he’s wearing but wears it for honourable purposes, and gives it over under reasonable conditions; Cobb Vanth can’t help Liam, but he doesn’t mind that he can’t see Liam’s face, and Liam sees no reason to deprive himself of the comfort Vanth offers. And then he’s back in the stars again, with the baby, and a passenger who speaks no Basic until she hooks up a translator to a murder droid purely in order to shout at him for breaking his word. Liam doesn’t see how he can be considered to have broken his word, and he’s still annoyed that he’s in this position at all, but he’s uneasily aware that the baby has eaten several of his passenger’s would-be unborn children and he feels like he owes her one.

That episode over, and the cabin of the _Razor Crest_ sealed, all Liam can do is fly to Trask and pray the ship doesn’t disintegrate. He sincerely hopes any spider-things remaining shrivel and die in deep space. Just so long as they don’t take the rest of his ship with them.

The _Razor Crest_ having fallen into shallow water almost immediately on landing, Liam goes in search of his fellow Mandalorians with the feeling that today probably can’t get much worse. The local trawler fishermen immediately prove him wrong by feeding first the baby and then him to some pelagic bastard, in the hopes of getting his armour off him when the pelagic bastard has sucked all the juices out. 

Fucking _typical_ , Liam thinks.

Liam fights between gasping breaths and the clang of his armour against the grate, he grasps and curses and tries not to waste breath on anything but survival, but the shock of the water and the drag of the beskar on his limbs is such that he knows he has only moments more - and the baby, in its little metal carapace, can’t have much more than that.

He sees Mandalorians arrive on the deck in a blur. The wrenching back of the grate, strong hands pulling him to the surface, all that feels distant and unreal.

“The baby,” he chokes. “The kid. The baby -”

This is apparently not the first time the fishermen have pulled this stunt, because one of the warriors immediately dives into the water. Liam leans on his side, coughing and choking on his own breath. Familiar hands settle on his shoulders, and lift him to a sitting position.

“Breathe, Liam,” says the Wildcat, who Liam last saw some time after the Purge. “Breathe.”

“Wildcat,” he gasps.

“Dragon,” she says. “What a handsome set of armour you’ve earned.”

The Mandalorian bursts from the water, carrying the child’s carapace, battered but intact: Liam breaks Kuiil’s handiwork open with shaking hands and the child emerges, cooing nonsensically at him, patting his face with its little claw-like fingers.

“A foundling,” the Wildcat says. “Is he yours? Does he have a name?”

“No name,” Liam says. “He’s in my charge. I swore I’d return him to his own kind.”

“And that is?”

“The Jedi,” Liam says, and sees, with surprise, the way the Wildcat goes still. “I hoped to find other Mandalorians, who might be able to help me.”

“Well, you’ve found Mandalorians,” the Wildcat says. “And we might be able to help you.” She rises to her feet. “Come. Let’s not discuss this here.”

In a back room of the local diner the Wildcat takes off her helmet.

“What the _hell_?” Liam blurts. The child squeaks. “You taught me _never_ -“

“I taught you a fair few things.” He’s never seen the Wildcat’s face before, but the warmth in her eyes matches the hardwon wisdom in the brackets around her mouth. “In those days I was more rigid, and you were livelier. There have been plenty of times when I needed to pass as something other than Shang.”

Liam finds himself lost for words. 

“It doesn’t change your _mandokar_ ,” the Wildcat says, matter-of-factly. “Adaptation is necessary to survival. Keep your helmet on, if it makes you more comfortable.”

“I’ve never taken it off,” Liam tells her. “Or allowed it to be taken from me.”

“And I have never doubted you.”

The baby coos, soft and low.

The Wildcat has a small group of other Mandalorians with her; one Shang, the Horse, and five or six others. They treat him with some awe, save for the Horse, who’s easygoing and friendly enough. It seems the Wildcat told stories of her foundling student - and now here he is, with a full suit of beskar armour and a quest they are only too happy to help with. 

Except for this one minor issue they’d like his help with first. And by _one minor issue_ they mean _full shipment of arms and ammunition intended for the Imperial Remnant_. The Wildcat wants to confiscate it, or failing that, blow it up.

“The New Republic won’t thank you,” Liam points out. Now that the Alliance has won, they look askance at freelance vigilantes. 

“What they don’t know about won’t hurt them,” the Wildcat says prosaically. “The Remnant hunts Mandalorians wherever they find them. Starve their supply lines and we can save another covert.”

“And resupply them, too?”

“We mostly sell the shipments back to the Republic,” the Wildcat says dryly. “For the reward money.”

“Mostly,” the Horse says, with his easy charm and wicked smile. 

Liam feels his brows arch behind his helmet. “And your weapons just… fell off the back of a truck?”

“Funny how that happens,” the Horse agrees. 

“Funny,” Liam echoes. He likes that smile.

The Wildcat grins.

The whole piracy scheme goes off quite smoothly, except that a) Liam is obliged to leave the baby with his former passengers, and spends the whole time hoping that the baby’s taste for eggs doesn’t reawaken, and b) the captain of the ship, a fanatic, kills both ship’s officers and himself before the Wildcat can get any information out of them. 

“They do this a lot,” the Horse says with disgust, throwing himself into the captain’s seat and hauling on the controls. The captain tried to scuttle the shipment, and they are currently heading nose-down for the ocean. Liam tries to kick the astromech into responding and correcting course, but a second’s glance shows the captain shot its decision circuits out too, so all it can do is bleep its distress. Liam turns it off, and staggers sideways as the ship finally responds to the Horse’s work and they all head up into the air at a dangerous angle.

A massive wave lifts the boats around the settlement and rocks its piers. They are not going to be popular with Air Traffic Control.

“Do what a lot?” Liam says, falling heavily into a chair, and the slumped body of one of the ship’s officers. He removes the body.

“Kill their own,” the Wildcat answers. She has her helmet back on, but she sounds deeply frustrated. The ship levels out. “They commit suicide, or kill others, as soon as there’s any chance they might be captured. To ensure they don’t give up information, see? They believe the Republic has Jedi who can winkle the whereabouts of the Empire’s last officers out of any Imp’s mind.” 

“They can do that?” Liam says, cold dread sinking into his gut. The baby is not harmless; he knows what the child can do. But the idea that his mind might not be his own -

The Horse snorts comprehensively. “They might try. I’d like to see them once young Daine is finished with them. Or our Kel.”

Liam looks at the Wildcat, who shakes her head. “Stealing information from a mind is a Sith trick,” she says. “Jedi only fight in self-defence, or to protect the defenceless. And they don’t torture.”

Liam’s stomach settles uneasily. The Wildcat grips his shoulder.

“The Empire are violent fools,” she says, wry as ever. “What else is new? Remember the Jedi were some of their most powerful opponents. They have every reason to make monsters of them. I wish you’d met the Lioness before she died; you’d have liked her.”

Liam grips her hand. “What did you want to know from that bastard, anyway?”

A surprised pause. “The location of Moff Ozorne.”

“He’s dead,” Liam says. “I knocked him out of the sky three months ago, over Nevarro.”

“ _Kandosii_ ,” the Horse says, with frank approbation.

“ _Oya_ ,” the Wildcat agrees. “If we can find a body.”

“The TIE fighter burned,” Liam says. “But I’m as sure as I can be.”

“Well,” the Wildcat says. “That might change some things.” She’s silent for a second, as the Horse steers their stolen shipment into dock. “Maybe when you take this child to the Jedi, you can carry a message?”

Liam is relieved to find that the baby behaved himself in his hosts’ house. He stays a day or two with the Wildcat’s group; long enough to learn the Horse’s true name, and the way he laughs in the darkness.

“Don’t be a stranger,” the Wildcat says on his departure, and then glares at him. “And don’t seduce my men!”

“Sorry.”

“No, you aren’t, you disgraceful boy. Go away.” The Wildcat pauses. “Give the lion cub my greetings. And tell him to eat his vegetables.”

The very _last_ thing Liam will be doing is telling the Lioness’s son - Jedi Knight, only surviving witness to the death of Emperor Roger, one of the few to have faced the Black Hand and lived, and (allegedly) lover of Princess Kalasin - to eat his vegetables.

Liam initially walks straight into the city of Calodan on Corvus, intending to ask if anyone has heard of Thom Cooper Trebond. The unwisdom of this course becomes immediately apparent when the local warlord makes him an offer he can’t refuse, involving a spear made of pure beskar and the murder of Thom Trebond, alias Cooper.

Still. At least it’s a lead.

Liam goes out into the mist and the fog of these dark, wearisome woods - nothing like Sorgan, he thinks - and looks around for the Jedi. Which turns out to be unnecessary because the Jedi jumps out of a tree and lands directly on him.

Thom Trebond is not a stylish fighter, but he’s an effective one. Their skirmish is short and brutal, and if Liam weren’t wearing beskar he’d be dead; the Jedi moves like nothing human, and his green lightsaber scores screaming marks off Liam’s armour. Liam ends it by yelling that he came to talk, not fight.

The Jedi immediately draws away. “Oh,” he says. “About the baby? I thought you brought him as bait.”

Liam swears indignantly. The baby squeaks.

“You would be surprised,” Thom says apologetically. “People who try to kill me usually don’t have a lot of scruples.”

“That magistrate just struck me as desperate.”

Thom Trebond gives Liam a very old look. From the Wildcat’s description, he isn’t even thirty, but he’s seen darkness in the galaxy and he looks it. “Desperate to duck justice, yes. All I want is information, and to free those townspeople she takes as hostages, but she knows if she holds out she might be able to deal with the New Republic before I get to her. And then _she_ gets immunity from prosecution and I get none of the information I need, and all those bits and pieces she’s collected vanish into wealthy pockets.”

“She had a beskar spear,” Liam says. “Looted from Mandalore. She offered it to me as payment.”

“It’s amazing how they like to flaunt these things,” Thom says, simply, without irony, like it’s nothing more than a fact of life. From some perspectives it is. “They keep telling me things belong in museums - when they don’t just shoot at me and have done with it.”

“What’s the information you want?”

“I’m looking for a kidnapped Jedi. Taken by one of her fellow collectors in the last days of the War.” Thom sighs. “He’s probably dead, but that’s no excuse not to try. Oh, and she has a large number of artefacts looted from the Corellian Jedi Temple, back when she was a successful administrator, not a backwater magistrate.” He rolls his eyes. “An _archaeological enthusiast._ ”

“And you are?” Liam says.

“A historian,” Thom says, and gives Liam a peculiarly sweet smile. “What did you want from her?”

“I was looking for you,” Liam says. “The Wildcat sent me.”

Thom’s eyes drift to the baby. “Because of the child?”

“Yes. He’s a foundling. I swore an oath to return him to his own people.” Liam watches, suppressing nervousness, as Thom crouches down by the tree trunk he set the baby on. The baby watches him with bright, happy eyes; he squeaks and coos at Thom, who suddenly looks very taken aback and overbalances onto the ground.

“What?” Liam demands.

“Nothing,” Thom says. “He knew my mother.” He stands up, and takes the baby in his arms. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

Thom Cooper Trebond has a small camp some way away, in a clearing where a Corellian light freighter is parked. A Wookiee pops out and yells at them. Thom yells back, and he disappears.

“Luckily my father isn’t on this trip,” Thom says, stoking a small fire and inviting Liam to take a seat. “He wouldn’t approve. Caf?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Thom sets a kettle boiling over the fire. The baby is sitting on his lap, staring worshipfully up at him, starlight in his dark eyes, and finally Liam can get a good look at him.

He seems vague; not the formidable fighter the Wildcat described, who Liam wouldn’t believe in if he hadn’t fought Thom himself. A handsome boy in his middle twenties, dressed in nondescript dark spacer’s clothes, he has dreamer’s hazel eyes, fine bone structure and muddled gingery hair that keeps flopping into his face, and one cybernetic replacement hand. He uses it as readily as he uses the other.

“So,” Liam says, uncomfortable with the silence as the baby stares at Thom and Thom stares back. “He’s a Jedi. Will you train him?”

“No,” Thom says. “He’s too young.”

“He’s _fifty years old_.” 

“He’s a baby,” Thom returns bluntly. “A traumatised baby, ripped from the burning Jedi Temple. You don’t want to know the details of his life under the Empire. He hasn’t had the time, or the opportunity, to come to terms with any of it. He doesn’t understand his powers, and his control over them is quite good but his understanding of when to use them is… maybe not so good?” He raises his eyebrows at Liam, who can’t help thinking of Buri, and how the baby had nearly choked her for the sake of a friendly arm-wrestle.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” 

“You-“ Liam jumps to his feet, reaching for a blaster.

“I’m not reading your mind,” Thom says. “I don’t need to. I had siblings, I know what untrained Force-sensitives are like.”

“Siblings?” Liam settles, uneasily.

“Alan’s a Jedi. Aly was a spy.” Thom leans over the fire to retrieve his caf, which he seems to drink like soldiers do: boiled to death and strong as murder. Like this Liam can’t clearly see his face. “She brought us news of the first Death Star.”

Liam notices the past tense. “I’m sorry.”

“Mm,” Thom says ambiguously. The baby reaches out to him. Thom gives him a small smile, and grasps his fingers. “Anyway. I can’t train Grogu, not yet - maybe not ever - but that doesn’t mean he isn’t one of our community. We can protect him, support him, until either his powers dwindle or he finds himself in a position to learn. However long that takes.”

“Grogu?” 

The baby sits upright and chirps in a way Liam has never heard before. Thom smiles faintly at his astonishment.

“Yes. That’s his name.”

“Grogu,” Liam repeats, half disbelieving, and the baby coos a soft trill of delight. 

“So,” Thom says. “I can’t take you back to Kel, not yet. But I was wondering if you’d mind lending me a hand with this magistrate - we can pick up your spear while we're at it. Like that, we could get on our way that much faster.”

“We?” Liam says, startled. Thom nods. “I’m not… like him. I’m not a Jedi.”

“But you are his father,” Thom Trebond says, in a tone that accepts no corrections; Liam doesn’t want to make any. “My da isn’t Force-sensitive either. He’s still my da.” Thom Trebond smiles very faintly, and looks over his shoulder like he’s looking at someone else. “And I wouldn’t be without him. Not if I could help it.”

For a long moment, neither of them says anything. And then Thom says: “Will you do it?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Liam rasps.

“Good,” Thom says. “Thank you.” He sips at his caf, and settles more comfortably in his seat. “Now. Here’s what I think we should do.”


End file.
